There is something remarkably abstract about commercial air travel. You walk from your New York apartment to a taxi to a terminal, amble through a series of tubes, fight discomfort in an ugly chair, and three hours later you're in Orlando. You can plausibly go the whole way without realizing you've left the ground.

It's a testament to the progress we've made since the Wright brothers first proved their concept late in the morning on December 17th, 1903. Airplanes are now so expertly engineered, and so well-built, that you no longer have to think about them.

Unless you want to. Then you'll discover that there's a lot to think about indeed, a fact I'm learning quickly as I roll into a shallow turn over the Florida coast in a two-seater PiperSport light aircraft.

It's only been about forty seconds since we took off. The fact that I'm already in control is simultaneously invigorating and deeply alarming. I expected there to be some sort of rigorous process--a waiting period? a physical? some paperwork?--before I'd be allowed to take the helm of a $138,000 machine that flies.

But here's what happened instead: on a whim, I called a number I found on sportpilot.org and set up an appointment for a $79, 45-minute lesson. Two weeks later I parked on the grass beside an open hangar, walked in, and introduced myself to the friendly proprietor. I waited on the tarmac--read a few pilotry magazines, shot the bull--while my instructor, a twenty year-old from Alaska who makes a living training new pilots and delivering planes all around the country (by flying them there), fetched himself a breakfast sandwich. When he got back he gave me a five-minute primer on aerodynamics; explained the buttons, rudders, stick and instruments; and took us up to about a thousand feet. "Your plane," he said.

I think I'm doing a pretty good job, actually. The stick is awfully sensitive: movements just one centimeter in any direction are translated with a slight delay into drastic changes in altitude and heading. My instructor tells me that most new pilots tend to over-maneuver and then over-correct, a nasty feedback loop which gets them into a sort of wrestling match with the air. But it looks like all my years playing first-person shooters have paid off--I'm a natural with the stick.

The pedals, not so much. These control the rudders, and after I confess to my instructor that I don't yet understand exactly what rudders do, he tells me not to worry. He points to the bottom of the screen in front of me full of indicators--airspeed, climb rate, heading, orientation, fuel level, oil temperature, etc.--and has me focus on a small white circle in between two vertical lines. It looks like a carpenter's level. "Keep the ball between those lines," he says. "If the ball goes left, press the left pedal. If it goes right, press the right pedal."

This sounds easy enough, and it would be if I didn't keep ignoring it entirely. That's my first big lesson: "Flying an airplane is the ultimate test of multitasking." He's right--most of the challenge here seems to be in efficiently collecting, triaging, and acting on a mass of messy information. But I can only seem to focus on one thing at a time. So when my instructor tells me to climb at five hundred feet per minute, I can delicately pull back on the stick and hit the number just so, but in the process I've forgotten where I am, which direction I'm going, how fast we're moving, and whether there are any birds or airplanes in my way.

These are dangerous tradeoffs, and an experienced pilot doesn't make them. At least in a small recreational plane like this, he spends--surprisingly, I think--90% of his time looking out of the window and just 10% looking at his instruments. He is a master at sizing things up. "What you have to do is kind of pop in every once in a while and take a quick look at all of your indicators. If something's yellow or red, you take care of that. Otherwise you make sure everything's on target and go back to looking out the canopy. It's situational awareness."

For now I'm lucky that I have someone to do all this thinking for me. It also helps that the PiperSport has dual controls, just like one of those cars used at driving schools, so that any adjustments made on one side are mirrored on the other. If I do anything wrong, then, my instructor can jump in and fix it. And if I do something really wrong, like slip into a stall or unrecoverable spin, one of us can pull the big red handle that launches the "ballistic recovery system," a rocket-powered parachute for the entire plane. This is about as comforting as it sounds.

I've chosen a beautiful day for my first outing, and now that I've gotten a bit of a feel for the aircraft I take a moment to appreciate what I'm doing. It's sunny and cloudless and I can see for miles. I am flying. I am several thousand feet above the ocean heading south, dipping left and right and up and down at will. It's a radical kind of freedom. It feels like driving a go-kart in three dimensions.

After we land safely through a mild crosswind, I can't help but ask my instructor: why was I allowed to do what I just did? Who thought it was okay for me to romp around in a sport plane?

"The U.S. still has this World War II attitude," he says, "where they want a country full of young pilots. So they set the bar pretty low."

No kidding.

But of course there's something else going on. And I think I know what it is, if only because my radically fast introduction to flying reminds me so much of another marvel that seems, at first, to be totally unrelated: the ease with which I learned to write nontrivial computer programs.

Maybe "ease" isn't the right word--I went through years of false starts before I finally started snowballing toward being a decently capable programmer. But once I got over that initial hump, it took only four or five months of intense studying in my sophomore year of college before I was suddenly able to create: I wrote programs to solve all kinds of math problems; I wrote a program to generate haikus from the text of Ulysses, and a program to send me a text message every time Tiger Woods birdied; I made a game that let me and my friends play just about every episode of Jeopardy! that had ever aired; etc. Whenever whimsy struck, I took to the computer and cooked something up.

It's just like my jaunt over the Florida coast. In both cases, I've unwittingly taken advantage of an incredible kind of leverage, in the sense that the stick I maneuver and the functions I write are tied to a deep brobdingnagian complex of other people's work. The miracle is that these accumulated layers of mechanism and edifice and expertise cohere so tightly, have been black-boxed and wrapped up into such friendly interfaces, that even a nitwit like me can put them to productive use.

Thus the twin facts that I was able to take control of a plane after a few moments' introduction and write useful programs after just a few months of work have basically nothing to do with my aptitude, and all to do with the equipment and know-how made available to me. In the flying case, I had the PiperSport--with its dead-simple sophisticated avionics, multiply redundant control systems, fine-tuned and forgiving aerodynamics--and my instructor--a twenty year-old, sure, but an unusually conscientious twenty year-old with about seven years of flying experience under his belt who in his own way represents the condensate of a century's worth of thinking about aviation.

In the programming case, I have an overwhelming number of tutorials, walkthroughs, introductions, books, and other guides. I have massive repositories of thoroughly documented open source code to reuse and imitate. And I have perhaps the world's most magnificent tower of abstractions, starting with transistors and moving up through circuits, chips, processors, all kinds of hardware I know nothing about, operating systems, and a nice tall stack of increasingly abstract programming languages undergirding the famously friendly ones I use, Python and Ruby. The net effect of which is to make "programming" an exercise in (a) wanting to do something, (b) realizing that someone's probably done it before, (c) looking up what they did, and (d) tweaking it a little bit. As I tweak I begin to understand, and to become less a user of all this wonderful mess than a contributor to it.

There is no doubt danger in all this abstraction--how easy it is nowadays to use a thing without knowing how it works--but it's hard to complain when you're playing in the clouds.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.